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DIAMOND

Diamond Light Source is a new 3rd generation synchrotron light facility. It became operational in January 2007 and is the largest scientific facility to be funded in the UK for over 40 years. The UK Government, through STFC, and the Wellcome Trust have invested £380M to construct Diamond and its first 22 beamlines of which currently 13 are operational with the remaining 9 entering service in the next few months. Diamond will ultimately host as many as 40 beamlines, supporting the life, physical and environmental sciences. Diamond's X-rays can help determine the structure of viruses and proteins, important information for the development of new drugs to fight everything from flu to HIV and cancer. The X-rays can penetrate deep into steel and help identify stresses and strain within real engineering components such as turbine blades. They can help improve process for the manufacture of plastics and foods by allowing scientists to observe changing conditions, as well as helping scientists develop smaller magnetic recording materials - important for data storage in computers. The active user population is growing rapidly and will soon exceed 1000 users drawn from the UK, the rest of Europe and indeed the rest of the world. The Diamond e-Infrastructure supports an integrated data pipeline comprising several shared components. The same configurable Java based Generic Data Acquisition (GDA) system is used across the beamlines. The low level control system is the widely used EPICS system which provides a stable and reliable means for hardware control. Diamond has worked closely with ISIS, and the STFC Central Laser Facility, e-Science and the central site services to implement a cross site user authentication system. Diamond has collaborated with the ESRF and ISIS to implement Web based user administration (DUODESK) and proposal submission (DUO) applications.
The DUODESK application is integrated with most aspects of user operation ranging from accommodation and subsistence through to system authentication, authorization and metadata retrieval. Diamond is currently working with STFC e-Science and ISIS to provide an externally available data storage repository based on the Storage Repository Broker (SRB) with the ICAT database